ISRO launches India's first multiple-satellite rocket
The Indian Space Research Organisation successfully launched its longest and most complex mission, sending multiple satellites from one rocket into two different orbits on Monday from Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh at 9:12 am.
The 37th Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle or PSLV took off from Sriharikota carrying 8 satellites – 3 from India, 3 from Algeria, and one each from Canada and the United States.
While SCATSAT-1 was released first into a 730 km Polar Sunsynchronous Orbit after about 17 minutes, the rest will be injected into a lower orbit of 689 km after around two hours.
The stop-start of the rocket – while travelling at a speed of more than 2660 kmph – positions PSLV as a unique launcher in the multi-billion dollar commercial launch market.
The SCATSAT, costing around Rs 120 crore, will help weather scientists forecast the formation of cyclones and monitor their land fall. India shares such data with the US, which helped them track Hurricane Sandy in 2012.
Pratham, a 10-kg satellite developed by students of the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay, will study the total electron count in space. The 5.25-kg PISAT made by students of Bengaluru’s PES University will take pictures of earth.
In another first later this year, India hopes to launch its heaviest rocket, the Geo-Synchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle Mark III, capable of taking up to 4 tonnes of communications satellite.
There will be two re-ignitions of the launch vehicle for this purpose. Besides SCATSAT-1, the others are PRATHAM and PISAT, two academic satellites from India, ALSAT-1B, ALSAT-2B and ALSAT-1N (all from Algeria) and Pathfinder-1 and NLS-19, from USA and Canada, respectively.
The 48-and-a-half-hour countdown for PSLV-C35/SCATSAT-1 Mission started at 8:42am on Saturday. According to ISRO, this is the first mission of PSLV in which it launched its payloads into two different orbits.
This was the 15th flight of PSLV in ‘XL’ configuration with the use of solid strap-on motors, it added.
The mission objectives of SCATSAT-1 are to help provide weather forecasting services to the user communities through the generation of wind vector products for weather forecasting, cyclone detection and tracking, ISRO said.
SCATSAT-1 is a continuity mission for scatterometer payload carried by the earlier Oceansat-2 satellite, ISRO added. (Agencies) / Image: IANS
